What is all this?

Ma-amad (English spelling) has an archaic
meaning, something like "ministry" or "service." It's also quick and easy to
type. This is a place where I collect and test software that can be used in the
ministry of the Gospel, either by churches or by those called to serve them.
For those who don't mind paying a small fee for the service that will help to
offset my hosting expenses and time, I also host some of the same software on
this web site for their use.

I am a Lutheran pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Synod.
These software projects began as ideas for improving my own efficiency and
that of my parish. They have matured over time to the point where they are
probably useful for others. If you subscribe to have something hosted here, it
removes the necessity for you to install the hosted software to your own web
site, and to maintain the installation. Everyone wins!

How do I get started?

A monthly subscription for a hosted application costs $2.25, which is billed
automatically through a Paypal invoice sent to your email address. You may pay
it securely through a Paypal account of your own, with a credit card, or any
other way that Paypal supports. Since you receive invoices for the service,
you also have something you can submit for reimbursement.

Invoices overdue by three months are subject to having the subscription
cancelled and the installation deleted. That means all you have to do to quit
your subscription is stop paying the invoices. On the other hand, if you want
to try the software for up to three months before compensating me for
my time and supporting my expenses, you can do so.

Service Planner

Pastors need a system for planning church services that can contain enough
information in one place to assemble the parts of the service. The parts
include the rite that will be used with any modifications, as well as the
propers for the particular day. It can include the sermon text and even the
sermon itself. It certainly includes the hymns. It would help greatly to have
the system be aware of the church year and capable of finding the propers on
its own, and yet configurable enough so that alternative propers may be used.
It would also be helpful to archive past service plans indefinitely either for
reuse or for reference.

Organists, altar guild, ushers, and other contributors to a service need a
way to see the plans for upcoming services and organize themselves according to
those plans. It can include a schedule for taking turns serving, or special
notes that the pastor may find useful.

All of these collaborators need to be able to work together in a way that is

conveniently accessible to all

encourages a standardized set of information so that nothing important is omitted

flexible enough for unusual circumstances

The Ma-amad Service Planner is designed to fit these needs.

A limited comparison of capabilities:

Ma-amad

Paper

MS Office

Can contain your service plans

Yes

Can contain your sermon plans

Yes

Modifiable from any web browser, anywhere

Yes

No

Automatically published for access by others

Yes

No

Helps to coordinate service contributors

Yes

No

Automatically finds lectionary days

Yes

No

Reminds last use of hymn choices

Yes

No

Special support for block plans

Yes

No

Automatically shows lesson texts

Yes

No

Comes with technical support

Yes

No

Includes sortable hymnbook cross-reference

Yes

No

Can integrate into your existing web site

Easily

With lots of work

Lists Reverse-chronological past OR Chronological future

Yes

No

Integrates Custom/Other Lectionaries

Yes

What?

No

Includes Hymnary propers

Yes

No

Forum to request new features

Yes

No

Proceeds benefit a Lutheran elementary school

Yes

No

Noted Features

The Ma-amad service planner provides a web-based solution for planning
church services, and is optimized for the Lutheran tradition as found
especially in the Evangelical Lutheran Hymnary.

For the convenience of pastors and service planners

It is aware of the church year, and comes preprogrammed to handle the
1-year Historic lectionary, as well as the 3-year ILCW lectionary.

Other lectionaries, festivals, and propers may be added if needed.

For those whose needs exceed the defaults, the propers and church year
configuration are adjustable, and can be exported or imported via a CSV
(comma-separated value) format. Any spreadsheet software can use that.

Services may be grouped into blocks which share certain attributes, for a
series like "Midweek Lent, 2016" or "Trinity I, 2015."

The listings of planned services are configurable, and may show not only
the hymns, but many of the propers, as well as free-form notes.

A configurable report listing provides essential information in a table
that can be printed or viewed online, while the regular service listing
provides much more.

The interface for entering a service is aimed at making the experience as
convenient and painless as possible.

Collaborating pastors can each have full-access logins.

Pastors no longer have to send their hymns or other service info to
organists and others. You can do your planning in a web browser. As soon as you
finish, the service is immediately available to your organists, etc. through
their own web browser.

For the convenience of organists and other service contributors

Listings may be simplified by individual users to suit their needs.

Though the system is password-protected, service listings and plans are
available for anyone to read who has access to the web site.

Individual services in the main listing can be formatted for convenient
printing with a click, making it unnecessary for organists and others to write
down their own lists of hymns or other details.

Logins can be provided for specific people. Organists and the like can have
limited access to show their availability for specific services.

All contributors can see the availablity of others, and when they have been
scheduled.

There are many more features, too many to list here.

Video Tutorials

How to Find the Hymns

The "Introduction to All Parts" video was made before it was possible to
fold service information up. Folding makes it much quicker to find the service
you want, but it also may confuse some users because it hides the hymns and
other things. This quick video explains how to see the hymns in services when
they are folded.

Introduction to All Parts

How to Add a Service

How an Organist Can Show Availability For a Service

How to Use a Reminder Message

Status and Support

If you think you have found a bug, or if you have a suggested improvement,
please contact me. The best way may be through the Ma-amad Google group,
where you may also find support from other users of this software.

Subscription for Hosted Service Planner

Subscribe to a service planner by clicking on this painfully-obvious, glossy
button:

If you wish to install the service planner to your own web site, you may do
so. In fact, you may also customize it to your heart's content. You can see and
download the code from the public Git repository. The only catch is that
if you distribute the service planner or make it available for download in a
modified form, you are also required to make the source code of your changes
available. That's what "open source" means. Your improvements may be
incorporated back into the Ma-amad Service Planner.

Flexical: an Online, Month-printable Calendar

This is actually an older project than the service planner, but it's not as
near to being ready for public deployment. The author has been using it for
over a decade, as it has slowly developed to its present form. You can see it
in action at the web site for Bethany and Concordia and for Columbia Lutheran School.

Unlike the Service Planner, the calendar shares a niche with many other
choices, including very slick ones from the likes of Google and Yahoo!, not to
mention desktop applications in practically every operating system. The
difference with Flexical is simply that you can access it from any web browser,
and it can be printed in a nice, traditional, landscape-oriented
calendar for church members who may have resisted the Internet so far. Not
even Google's online calendar can do that, though there are desktop
applications that do. In the author's opinion, Flexical does it better, though
the quality of printing varies widely from one web browser to another. This is
due to deficiencies in particular browsers, not in Flexical. (Google Chrome's
printing support is the best at this writing.) Flexical started as a fork of
another person's project called PHPEventCalendar.

Once the first public release of the service planner has debuted, and
hopefully there are some hosted installations on this web site helping to
defray the cost, I hope to prepare a similar public release of
Flexical. In the meantime, the code is already available for anyone who wants
to install it themselves, at this public Git repository.

Church Database

There are expensive solutions in this domain. This one is free. Built upon
the database component of OpenOffice/LibreOffice called Base, this database is
really a work-in-progress. It was once implemented as a database-driven web
site. Though it worked well for me, it was not an easy thing for other people
to install and learn. Now it is reimplemented in Base, which is freely
available on multiple computing platforms. All that is needed to install it is
to install OpenOffice or LibreOffice with its Base component, and open the
database file provided in the archived folder. To use it, you will begin by
entering data using one of several Forms you can open. Eventually, there will
also be reports that allow you to present various data and the results of
processing it.

Church Database stores the usual vital statistics that churches record about
individuals and families in a relational database that can be backed up by
copying a collection of files.

Download Church Database from here: http://www.ma-amad.com/download/ChurchDatabase.zip There may be
updates that haven't been published to this link yet, so if you try it
and find it lacking some feature you'd like, feel free to contact the author
about getting the latest version.